Stephen Crane: A Great Writer of American Naturalist Fiction and Non-Fiction, and of Local Color
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American author of the late 19th century, whose work, in terms of style and sub-genre, was somewhere between American Romanticism and American Naturalism (with some American Realism added). Crane wrote at the end of a century (the 19th), a time when several literary styles and genres are typically blended together until a new century finds its voice (which became, in the first decades of the 20th century, at least from a broad perspective, American Modernism, of the sort expressed by Faulkner, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson and others, with its emphasis on fragmented narratives, stream-of-consciousness writing, and other narrative-related experimentation). Stephen Crane, given his creativity and thirst for experimentation (he was an early American Naturalist when Romanticism remained in vogue) no doubt would have loved being alive to write at this time, but died too early. Crane's peculiarly mixed writing style (with elements of Romanticism; Realism; Naturalism; Regionalism; and local color, sometimes in one piece) worked in Crane's favor (as with his masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage); in other ways it did not. For example, Crane's first novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, a story set in New York City about an Irish immigrant girl who turns to prostitution, was considered too realistic for most tastes. For many of the same reasons Maggie was lukewarmly received, however, A Red Badge of Courage, about a Civil War soldier facing his first combat, was a critical and popular success. The Red Badge of Courage also catapulted its author, still in his early twenties, to fame. While it is true that not all of Crane's published works should be deemed great in and of themselves, Stephen Crane should still be considered a great author because of his success with both naturalistic fiction and non-fiction, and also because of his success as a local colorist.
Within American Naturalism, two characteristics...
Stephen Crane's story "The Open Boat" is a masterful example of Naturalistic storytelling that evokes the characters of four men stranded on a small boat as well as character of the sea itself. By the end of this long short story, despite the fact that Crane has provided us with only the most elliptical clues about these four men, we have came to understand a great deal about their characters.
Stephen Crane's novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, was written during America's "Gilded Age" which was the era from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the Century. The name was given to the period by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, who poked fun at the period for its rampant corruption. During this essential time of American development, New Yorker's were categorized into two different
Monster On June 2nd, 1892 a black man was murdered in the New York town of Port Jervis. He was lynched, or hanged, by a mob of people who accused him of assaulting a local girl. Four days later, on June 6th, there was a "Coroners investigation into the death of Robert Lewis by lynching" (New York Times) which implicated several townsfolk, who quickly left the area. This incident is regularly
This means that all reality in the book is quite consciously the construction of the narrator, which leads almost automatically to a reflection on the part of the reader as to the construction of their own reality -- just as the narrator in Invisible Man creates his own "truth" about what occurred in their past and in the world around them, through unconscious though necessary perspectives and perceptions, so
One critic's reading of "The Open Boat" positions the story as a turning point in Crane's career, away from the isolation and interiority of The Red badge of Courage and towards a sense of the need of community and the inescapability of interpersonal bonding. Statements like "Four scowling men sat in the dingey" are taken by some to be indicators of the camaraderie that must necessarily form between any
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the best example of Realism in literature because of how Twain presents it to us. Morality becomes something that Huck must be consider and think out as opposed to something forced down his throat. He knows the moral thing to do would be to report Jim, noting, " "People would call me a low down abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum --
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